Three Women in Dark Times: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil »

Three women, all philosophers, all of Jewish descent, provide a human face for a decade of crisis in this powerful and moving book. The dark years when the Nazis rose to power are here seen through the lives of Edith Stein, a disciple of Husserl and author of La science et la croix, who died in Auschwitz in 1942; Hannah Arendt, pupil of Heidegger and Jaspers and author of Eichmann in Jerusalem, who unhesitatingly responded to Hitler by making a personal commitment to Zionism; and Simone Weil, a student of Alain and author of La pesanteur et la grâce.

Following her subjects from 1933 to 1943, Sylvie Courtine-Denamy recounts how these three great philosophers of the twentieth century endeavored with profound moral commitment to address the issues confronting them. Condemned to exile, they not only sought to understand a horrible reality, but also attempted to make peace with it. To do so, Edith Stein and Simone Weil encouraged a stoic acceptance of necessity while Hannah Arendt argued for the capacity for renewal and the need to fight against the banality of evil.

Courtine-Denamy also describes how as a student each woman caught the eye of her famous male teacher, yet dared to criticize and go beyond him. She explores each one's sense of her femininity, her position on the "woman question," and her relation to her Jewishness.

"All three," the author writes, "are compelling figures who move us with their fierce desire to understand a world out of joint, reconcile it with itself, and, despite everything, love it."

About the Author:
Sylvie Courtine-Denamy is a French philosopher and author of Hannah Arendt. G. M. Goshgarian recently translated into English two books by Gérard Genette, The Aesthetic Relation and The Work of Art, both from Cornell.

Publishers Weekly

The darkness of the decade 1933-1943 was at least partially illumined by the energetic syntheses of thought and action that Courtine-Denamy (Hannah Arendt) skillfully examines in the three remarkable women of this book's subtitle. What animates the comparison are stark differences overlaid on basic similarities: all three were Jews and philosophers, all were imperiled by the Nazi menace. But by 1943 Stein had become a Carmelite nun and perished in Auschwitz; Weil had allied with the French Resistance and died of malnutrition in London; and Arendt had emigrated to New York, where she called for a Jewish army in Palestine. Weil, whose passions split between politics and religion, serves as linchpin for comparisons with the cloistered nun Stein and the fervently Zionist, eminently unmystical Arendt. Stein, the traditional Catholic, accepted her Jewishness; Weil, the wayward gnostic who never converted to the Christianity she loved, did not. Intersecting images from the personal lives of the three women, who never met (of the three, only Arendt knew of the other two), suggest temperamental affinities among them: Stein and Weil memorized the Lord's Prayer in premodern languages (Stein in medieval Gothic, Weil in ancient Greek); at different points of their lives, Arendt and Weil broke into absurdist laughter over the impact of Nazism (Arendt while observing the Eichmann trial, Weil while fleeing France in the company of devout Jews). A glossary of names and terms from French political life during the Nazi years would have enhanced this otherwise highly readable American edition of an originally French work. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|